Issa: 'How Much Pornography' Does it Take 'to Get Fired' at EPA?

"How much pornography would it take for an EPA employee to lose their job?" Darrell Issa, (R-Calif.) Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, asked EPA officials at a hearing yesterday, where it emerged that an EPA employee viewed two to six hours of porn per day since 2010.

The employee has over 7,000 porn files on his computer and even watched porn when inspector general agents visited his office, Deputy Assistant Inspector General Allan Williams testified in a statement submitted to the committee. He makes over $120,000 a year and he even received performance awards for his time at the agency. And this man is still employed at the EPA, even though he confessed to the time he spent viewing the pornography.

"This individual spent four consecutive hours on a site called 'sadism is beautiful,'" Issa said at the hearing. "I've been out of the business world for a number of years, but I have a strong feeling that the House of Representatives has figured out how to block sites with titles like that. It would shock me that they wouldn't. It shocks me that you could tell us that you do a pretty good job [of blocking porn sites] and something as explicit as those key words or 'bear so horny' or - I'm not going into the other names, it disgusts me. You are running an organization from which no one can get fired."

Issa then pointedly asked EPA officials whether it was a crime to falsify documents (timesheets), but the officials declined to answer.

There is another EPA employee who sold jewelry and weight loss pills from her office, the testimony notes. The Office of the Inspector General reports that the director of the agency's Office of Administration, Renee Page, sold products from her office during business hours and even used her government email account.

Page also hired 17 of her family members and friends as paid interns. She also paid her daughter - who also works at the EPA - from her agency's budget account. But instead of being punished, Page received a prestigious Presidential Rank Award in 2010, for which she got $35,000 in cash.

Another EPA manager allowed an employee to stay at home and not report for duty for several years. "Based on a longstanding arrangement... this EPA manager not only entered fraudulent time-and-attendance records" for the employee, but also approved them, says a report by deputy assistant inspector general Allan Williams. This is estimated to have cost the government over $500,000. "Even more egregious is that this EPA manager authored and approved exemplary performance appraisals that resulted in a cash award for the absent employee."

"The OIG also found evidence that implicated a senior executive" who was aware that the "employee had been teleworking for more than 20 years with very little substantive work product to show during this time.... The senior executive took no action, even though he knew the EPA was being defrauded."

"There's a three- ring circus going on in the EPA, and it's quite embarrassing," said Rep. John Mica (R.-Fla.) at the hearing. "You've got people who don't work, who get paid for it. People who've broken laws, and stay on the payroll and get paid."